Either you make and enjoy art, or your spend all your time peddling your polished turds to people for $$. You can't have both.. What is that saying? Pick two: fast cheap or good. It really irks me to read articles like the one CR posted. Like perusing a hobby for the authenticity and enjoyment of it is "wrong". Notice how they say "poor photographer" vs "rich".

That's what I like about our little forum here.. we do what we like, we all have individual takes on the same thing and we still manage to be friends. That's more real and honest to me than people flooding flickr with the same boring B&W pics of abandoned insane asylums or people who only use Moog or euro rack stuff and pat themselves on the back for their endless series of randomized "sound experiments".

So now that I know a bit more about processing, I went back and re-did some of the pics from my first trip with an actual camera in 2013 (Ireland, for work)... looking back at how I took those then, they look horrible - I had no idea what to do with white balance, for example...

Cliffs of Moher on a before I knew what a good lens was or what a filter did to cut down on haze...Cliffs of Moher by ChristianRock, on Flickr

Some of my mistakes I can't correct anymore, like picking a lens that flares (most of my cliff pictures suck because of flares and "ghosts" from the sun), or blowing out highlights, like on the right top of the last picture. Oh well, I learned some

And two with a relatively new camera, and an older "not so good lens, but with character" In the first one, a rare appearance by family... it's my wife and my 8-year old son walking in front of me. I'm sure the 6yo and the 4yo were creating some trouble somewhere out of the frame...

It seems like to be an "artistic" photographer, the minimum for entry is b&w photos of dolls and trash left in empty fields, brick walls, peeling paint etc. I feel the same way about anything lol. Even with synths I get hot under the collar when some idiot puts a cardboard box on his head and does an 80's cover and all the blogs go nuts, while someone like Suit toils away quietly behind the scenes for years and years. However, that is beginning to change for him, I'm proud to say

christianrock wrote:And earlier this week my wife said there were 5 (FIVE!!) deer in our backyard. The population must have grown too much around here in Georgia... maybe I should take up hunting?

They don't have many natural predators anymore in many areas (except for good ol' humans). The South in particular lacks many predators for full grown deer anymore except for the cougars in SW Florida. Hunting is decently regulated these days so that population doesn't disappear (a good thing), however it's now to the point where some articles speculate white-tailed deer is *over* populated in some areas.

Short of reintroducing apex predators like red wolf and cougars (an idea as a photographer I would dig but most suburbanites would not ) and wildlife management (culling etc.), there's hunting. So, maybe. I've heard that hunting can be an expensive hobby, depending on how "deep" you get into it. (Kind of like synths, I guess.)

I have friends who hunt... one is particularly good at it. He's hunted up to 40 deer per season - on busy seasons he just gives the meat away. But he's slowed down a lot... still, he's able to hunt in the bow and arrow season as well as the gun season, that's how he's hunted so much. He's already promised my kids to give them some bow and arrow lessons, they're actually interested in it for fishing, we'll see!